Israeli WMD Institute Used Soldiers as Guinea Pigs in Untested Anthrax Experiment | Global Research

Israeli WMD Institute Used Soldiers as Guinea Pigs in Untested Anthrax Experiment | Global Research

A six year struggle by a group of IDF soldiers and officers for justice has ended with the Stateagreeing to pay them $6-million (Yossi Melman’sHebrew story and the English version, which has been replaced on the Jerusalem Post site by a far more IDF-friendly story by Yaakov Lapin) for their participation in a medical experiment conducted under false pretenses.  Between 1999-2005, the ministry of defense, IDF, and the Israeli chemical and biological weapons institute at Nes Ziona collaborated with their American counterparts in research to find a suitable anthrax vaccine.  This was the period just after the U.S. “white powder” letter scare in which several Americans were infected with anthrax and died.  There was a huge furor and hysteria in this country over the potential terror threat.

Presumably, U.S. medical authorities either wouldn’t test human subjects with an untested vaccine or couldn’t get approval to do so (remember the notorious Tuskegee experiment?).  But their Israeli colleagues were more than happy to bend medical and ethical rules, especially in return for the hundreds of millions of shekels in research funding that flowed into Nes Ziona as a result.  Because the subject of the experiment (anthrax that might be used as part of a terror attack) was so sensitive, those who conducted the Israeli experiment refused to tell the IDF “volunteers” (some of whom reported being pressured by their superiors to participate) the purpose of the project.  They would not tell them with what they were being injected or why.  They weren’t warned of possible side effects (of which there were many subsequently).  Further, they threatened that if participants spoke of the project they would be punished.